How Workflow Automation Helped WavHello’s Email Marketing

May 04, 2016

WavHello is a startup selling products that are designed to engage families from day one through the use of technology. Inspired by the co-founder’s own wife’s pregnancy and the desire to bond with their unborn baby through music, BellyBuds were born. Since then, they have quickly grown into a family-first technology company, with an expanding list of unique products, their own mobile app, and even an appearance on Shark Tank.

When Tara Humphries was hired as WavHello’s Head of Digital Marketing she was immediately faced with the task of integrating their marketing efforts with their eCommerce operations. WavHello’s main point of sale is their online store, which they run with Shopify. This makes online marketing a huge part of their business, and Tara knew they needed an integration solution that would allow them to target customers based on their interests rather than by sending general promotions.

That’s why Tara chose Marketo for marketing automation and Workato to seamlessly integrate it with Shopify. At first, they tried a different Marketo recommended integration solution but found that it did not meet their needs as it only copied names and email addresses. It also did not control for duplicates, meaning that some customers had multiple entries in their Marketo system. “We use Marketo almost like a CRM, which is only possible if new transactions are being transferred from Shopify to Marketo without duplicates,” said Tara. “We don’t want to send the same email to the same customer twice.”

Beyond integrating Marketo and Shopify, the WavHello team can achieve an even higher level of automation by adding their accounting system, Quickbooks, and Workbot for Slack into the mix. Their eCommerce and marketing workflow is completed through these 3 stages:

I. Shopify Transactions to Marketo for Targeted Email Marketing
II. Shopify and 3rd Party Transactions to QuickBooks for Seamless Accounting
III. Workbot for Slack for Full Workflow Command

When Shopify can work together with Marketo and QuickBooks, all 3 apps become more powerful. Email marketing capabilities are smarter and more targeted, accounting reports are up to date in real time allowing more effective financial management and investment in business growth, and Workbot allows you to command and keep track of all elements of your business straight from Slack.

I. Shopify Transactions to Marketo for Targeted Email Marketing

Using Workato, WavHello can now bring all of their customer information into Marketo from Shopify by creating leads and updating them accordingly. At the same time, every single purchase order is recorded as a custom object in Marketo which is done solely through Workato. Transaction history, number of orders, lifetime spent, name, email, and much more can be updated seamlessly, automatically and without errors or duplicates in those custom objects which are tied to individual leads.

Tara achieves this complete transfer of customer objects and duplicate control with a recipe which updates Marketo with all of the Shopify data on each customer.

“I don’t know any backend code,” Tara said, “and I realized other integration options couldn’t give us what we needed. Workato had a simple interface that I could understand and use at my level of knowledge.” The result is a beautiful sync between Shopify and Marketo, enhancing the performance of both apps, more targeted email campaigns, and allowing Tara to have incredible marketing insights. Customers now receive highly relevant emails directly based on their past purchases and WavHello is enjoying a huge increase in repeat purchases. “Now we’re able to have a database of all our customers and map the customer journey,” says Tara, “and no duplicates!”

II. Shopify and 3rd Party Transactions to QuickBooks for Seamless Accounting

After the successful (and speedy, the integration was up and running in a few weeks!) implementation of Shopify to Marketo, Tara began to consider automating WavHello’s finances as well. Besides their Shopify eCommerce store, WavHello also sells through 3rd party retailers like Amazon and Walmart. These 3rd party revenue streams, as well as Shopify transactions, can all be synced into Quickbooks using this Shopify to QBO recipe and this CSV to Shopify recipe.

This recipe automatically sends any transactions in Shopify to QuickBooks and creates a new receipt from QuickBooks.

This recipe detects when there is a new line in a CSV file in Dropbox and sends the enclosed transaction data to QuickBooks based on a condition. The CSV files would contain the transaction histories from 3rd party retailers.

Moving all transaction data into QuickBooks means up to date accounting and real time financial management. This allows the WavHello team to properly invest in and budget their business so they can continue to grow.

III. Workbot for Slack for Full Workflow Command

Workbot is a powerful tool that not only talks to you in Slack, but does work for you without ever leaving the Slack console.

A recipe like this one can bring Workbot to life. For Tara that means customer info on demand, email campaign charts generated and shown in Slack, and transaction notifications.

Integration Means More Repeat Customers and Higher Revenue

For the WavHello team, the gains from integrating their Marketo and Shopify apps have been significant. Since the integration was up and running, WavHello has increased their repeat customers by 65%. Not to mention the thousands of dollars saved from using Workato instead of a costly IT team or custom integration.

“Without IT support, I needed a platform that allowed me to do marketing automation. Workato was like a gift from God,” said Tara. “If I didn’t find it, I would have had to go way over budget to hire someone to do the integration.” Now, Tara can completely map the customer journey and view important statistics, helping to up their marketing efforts and increase sales.

Do you want to supercharge your email marketing with integration? Contact Workato at info [at] workato.com and tell us about the workflow you want to achieve.